I awoke slowly in a strange room. I didn’t remember going to sleep. I didn’t remember being awake either. I was starting to realize that I couldn’t remember much of anything.
I rose to my feet. The room was clean and sterile. There was no emotion or joy in it except for a poster of a cat hanging on a tree branch. I know what cats are. That's good. Unfinished metal devices of unknown origin were strewn haphazardly across various tables. In the corner, there was a plastic trash can. I didn’t know why, but it called to me. Compared to the alien machines, it was relatively innocuous, but it seemed important somehow. A low groan came from the can.
Had I always been able to hear? Or see? Had it always been possible for me to stand up and move? It didn’t feel familiar.
I looked down at my body. I saw toast smeared in strawberry jam. I was a walking piece of sentient toast. Why did I know what toast was but not who I am? I concentrated. I had nothing but very dim memories of an amber field of grain. I understand the world but not myself.
I didn’t know where I came from or what I used to be. Did it matter? I didn't want to think about it. Perhaps there were more pertinent questions. For example, where was I now?
Cautiously, I inched towards the garbage bin. It was too high to see its contents, so I simply knocked it over. Crumpled blueprints, scrap metal, and medical waste poured out. I sincerely hoped the suspicious, green puddle I was stepping in wouldn't give me some new, horrible plague. At the top of the pile was another piece of toast. At a glance, he looked much like me, but his body was burnt and had no jam. He didn’t seem to be conscious yet. He was just groaning in pain.
Immediately, I felt protective of him. We probably came from the same place. That meant we were almost like siblings. “Hey.” I nudged him. “Wake up.”
“Huh?” He opened his eyes. “Who are you?” He considered his question. “Who am I?”
“I was hoping you’d know. I just woke up here.”
“Me too. Weird.” He blinked. “That’s horrifying. Why do I even exist? What’s the purpose of my life?”
He was not taking this well. “I know it’s strange, but I think we can-”
“Why?!” He was pacing in anxious circles now.
I heard footsteps outside the room. “Shh! I think someone’s outside!” I whispered to him. He didn’t seem interested.
“I hear voices from inside the testing chamber,” said the thing. “Our friend must finally be up.” A curious figure stepped through the open doorway. It was a nearly hairless animal standing on its hind legs. I realized it was called a Velociraptor. It was a hulking creature that stood at nearly twice my height. Bright red feathers flared along its body like an all-consuming blaze. Another beast walked up beside it. I could only assume it was another Velociraptor though it was hard to tell. It was completely featherless, giving it a grotesque, alien appearance. Thankfully, part of its body was made of metal, which meant not all of it was raw-chicken-looking. Wires protruded from various iron joints that creaked and clanked as it walked. Its arm was entirely robotic. The fleshy parts of its body moved with a sort of unnatural rhythm. It looked straight at us with cold, calculating eyes.
“Stay back!” I cried, stepping in front of my fellow slice.
“Calm down,” said the non-robotic raptor. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“Really? Because there's a horrifying cyborg-monster-amalgamation-thing standing behind you, and it doesn’t exactly look friendly.”
“Don’t be so quick to judge,” he explained, as if this were all perfectly normal. “That’s my lab assistant. He provides me with a little bit of extra muscle when I need to move equipment around. That’s all.”
“Lab assistant? Are you some sort of scientist?”
“I’m the best sort of scientist. I call myself Dr. Oort Percival, but you can call me Dr. Oort Percival. This whole laboratory belongs to me. There were some humans here when I found it, but they’re gone now. A word of advice: Don’t eat humans. They are barely palatable.”
“If you’re a scientist, does that mean you’re the one that created us?”
“Yes, indeed. You are the pinnacle of all my advancements. I have created sentient life. If you think about it, I’m basically a god now.”
He made us. That means… NOPE. NOT GOING DOWN THAT RABBIT HOLE. Ask about something different. “Do I have a name? I think I’d like to be called Jelly.”
"Sure. Toast with an identity sounds interesting."
It wasn’t a perfect name. I was clearly covered in jam, not jelly. On the other hand, Jam is a ridiculous title. The other slice of toast was starting to calm down a bit. Having seen that Percival was clearly harmless, he became a little excited. “What if I were called… Asher?”
“I like it,” I told him.
Percival pointedly ignored him. “Your names aren’t too important at the moment. You know, when I arrived in this time period, I had all these grand ambitions of world domination. I wanted absolute power. But then I found a slice of toast. It was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Much better than a human.”
I didn’t like where this was going. I took a step back, but he only inched closer.
“But I knew it could be improved. Day and night I labored, trying to create a perfect piece of toast. Finally, I accomplished my goal, but something wasn’t quite right. Yes, it tasted good, but I didn’t feel like I earned it. Where was that jolt of excitement you got from Protoceratops meat?” He leaned in close, centimeters away from us. “I soon realized what I was missing. Do you want to guess?”
“Seasoning?” I tried.
“The thrill of the hunt. I’ll give you a sixty-second head start.”
“What?!” I cried. “What happened to ‘We’re not going to hurt you?!’”
“What can I say? I like playing with my food. All I really did was make noises with my mouth. If you chose to interpret them as words, that’s on you. Thirty seconds left.”
“That was not half a minute!”
“Twenty seconds.”
There was no reasoning with him. I started to run away, only to see that Asher was completely paralyzed. I went to grab him before escaping. We raced across the hallway. All the rooms had their doors open. Maybe one of them contained something helpful we could use. There was an aquarium, a terrarium, a snack bar, a reactor core, a computer lab, and what looked like some kind of shrine dedicated to what seemed to be toast gods.
We kept running, hoping to see something that could be used to our advantage. Instead, we saw the cyborg, hot on our heels. It followed us with a steady, unflinching determination. We were faster than it but just barely. Vicious jaws snapped behind us. We’d get tired sooner or later. Then it would catch us. Then we would die. Like most people, I considered death to be a bad thing.
That was when I saw it. One of the rooms had a giant safe. Whatever was in there was clearly something Percival didn’t want anyone to have. If it was that important, then it must have been something really destructive. “In here!” I told Asher. We made a sharp turn into the room. The cyborg couldn’t slow down fast enough and ended up stumbling just long enough to buy us some time. “Help me shut the door!” Asher and I pushed against
the door and managed to close it just at the last second.
Asher relaxed his muscles. “I think we’re safe,” he said.
The handle began to rattle. We both took a step back. Footsteps came from outside. Percival had caught up. The handle rattled some more.
Then some more.
And some more.
“You’re playing dirty, you know that?” Percival asked, rather calmly. “Taking advantage of my inability to open doors? That’s not going to work. The hunt is still on.” We heard the sounds of him and his robot walking away.
“That was close,” I said.
“I know, right?” Asher answered.
It didn’t look like Percival would be coming back soon. “So… how are you feeling? I mean, that was probably the most intense experience of our lives. Granted, that’s not saying much.”
He gazed off into the distance. “I feel afraid. It’s pretty horrifying to realize you owe your existence to the whims of a malevolent-”
“Let's talk about something different.”
“But this is the most important-”
"Please."
Asher saw the look in my eyes. I knew he wanted to say something more, but he respected my wishes. "Okay. What do you think we should do about the raptors?"
“The safe in this room probably has something important like a laser gun. We can then use it to fight the raptors.”
Asher made a face that clearly showed that he didn’t love my plan. “How would we get into the safe? What if there’s something useless in there, like money?”
What a ridiculous statement. Of course I had thought of that. “I did not think of that,” I said. Stupid conscience. Making me tell the truth. “But it’s okay. We have plenty of time.”
Just then, a loud banging sound came from the door. The raptors were trying to use brute force.
“This is fine,” I told him, “That door is probably very sturdy. It might be made of hardwood. I think that’s a thing. We just need to think of a fool-proof plan.”
Asher looked at the door. Then at the safe. Then at the door. Then at me. “I have an idea, but you’ll have to trust me.”
“What is it?”
“We open the door.”
Admittedly, that sounded like a very stupid idea, but I didn’t say that. “That sounds like a very… not-smart idea.”
“Please. Just trust me.”
I had only just met him, but if you think about it, I had only just met myself. At that moment, I chose to trust him. “Okay, but how do we reach the
doorknob? It was made for some kind of animal called a human. We’re too small for it.”
“Climb up onto my shoulders.”
I did as he asked. Atop his shoulders, the entire room was visible before me. I felt powerful. “We are now Ultimate Toast!”
“Excuse me. What?”
“This is our ultimate form, Ultimate Toast.”
“You’re just standing on my shoulders.”
“Yes.”
“Sure…” Asher didn’t understand my brilliance.
We walked up to the door. The banging was intensifying. “On three,”
“One… two…”
This was it. The moment that would not only define the rest of our lives but determine if we would be able to live them out.
“Three!” I swung the door open as hard as I could. The cyborg, now with a miniature battering ram attached to its body, burst in. Expecting to hit the door again, it was unable to stop its momentum. It slammed into the safe and created a hole just big enough for us to fit through.
Percival walked in. I had been hoping that the prospect of breaking his safe would terrify him. Rather, he was more annoyed than anything. Although he didn’t seem quite as smug as before, which I considered a plus. “Don’t let them get the device,” he commanded.
Without a moment’s hesitation, I leapt off of Asher. The cyborg tried to stop me, but it was too slow. I slid into the safe without a second to spare. Inside, I found a portable metal machine with a small interface on the side. I picked it up. The warm glow shone on my face. The creature stuck its arm in and tried to claw at me, forcing me against the wall.
I couldn’t see outside. Maybe Asher was about to do something heroic and get me out of here? I waited for a few seconds. Nope. Yelling incoherently, I charged at the cyborg’s arm and smashed it with the machine. I wasn’t sure what it did, exactly, but it certainly made a good bludgeon.
The beast retracted its arm as it screeched out in agony. There was my opportunity. In that brief moment, I jumped out of the safe. The raptors were ignoring Asher. He reached his hand out towards Percival.1 Maybe Asher had another idea? Then he thought better of it. His gaze kept darting across the room. No one was touching him, yet there was panic in his eyes. All he did was fidget nervously.
“Are you okay?” I asked, landing beside him.
“I just don't know how to– what to– I’m not sure I can–” He took a deep breath. “Yes, I’m fine.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. I hated to see him so agitated. We would need to discuss this later. The cyborg raptor’s pain was quickly subsiding. The device had a screen with a complicated layout. “Asher, I’m going to point this thing at them, mash random buttons, and hope it’s some kind of death beam.”
This seemed to knock him out of his stupor. “What?! No, are you crazy? We don’t know what that thing will do!” He tried to take it from my hands.
The cyborg was quickly approaching. “Well, we can’t do nothing!”
“Yes, we can! We can absolutely do nothing while we think of a better solution!”
Percival was still watching us with his analytical eyes. He made no effort to stop what we were doing. Instead, he tensed his muscles, watching his cyborg with a strange sense of urgency. “That thing is dangerous,” he warned. “You’d better set it down before you hurt yourselves.”
If Percival didn’t want us to use it, that was enough of a reason for me. I began to button mash. The interfaces were complex and unintuitive. A red x was for confirmation and a green checkmark to cancel. Who makes something like that? Finally, the machine made a sound best described as a bloop. An automated voice came from within the device.
Invalid input. Default coordinates selected. Would you like to activate temporal device?
Asher was still trying to pull it out of my hands. The cyborg was close enough that if it needed oxygen, I would have felt its breath on my face.
I smashed the x.
Percival grinned as if he had just been pleasantly surprised.
I’m not entirely certain what happened next. I was sent hurtling through a weird… I don’t even know what to call it. It wasn’t outdoors, but you couldn’t honestly say it was a building. Among other things, there were a lot of bookshelves, some kind of giant centipede, a glowing fish that was just casually floating in the air, and a tome titled How to Make Friends and Eat Them Too: A Guide for Dragons. I was given only a few seconds to take this all in. I soon felt a tug that ripped me out of that strange universe.
Now we were in some kind of desert. Asher stood next me, observing the golden sands that surrounded us. Wind howled as it passed through endless dunes. “I think we’re dead,” he told me.
I looked at the device. The screen said Travel completed. “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure that this whatchamacallit has teleported us to some kind of desert world.”
“Well, that’s just great,” Asher said with surprising tranquility, “We’ll have a bit of time before we die of thirst instead.”
“How sure are you that we need water to survive?”
Asher opened his mouth to say something. Then he thought for a moment. “I guess you’re right. This is a definite improvement over being chased by bloodthirsty dinosaurs. I should have trusted you.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m going to start thinking of a way out of this place.” He got down on his knees and began drawing squares in the sand and connecting them with
arrows. He stroked his chin thoughtfully.
I took another look at my surroundings, trying to see if there was anything useful. “Um, Asher.”
“Yeah?”
“I still think this is an improvement over our prior situation. However, it would seem your previous claim that we are no longer being chased by
bloodthirsty dinosaurs is growing increasingly difficult to prove.”
“What do you mean by that?”
I pointed at the T. rex standing behind us.2
He turned around to look at it. “Hold on. We don’t know it’s bloodthirsty. Maybe it’s intelligent, like Percival, but not as hungry. Hey, Mr. Tyrannosaur, are you trying to eat us?”
I fully expected it to give some kind of articulate response. It just stared at us. “I don’t think it wants to hurt us, but I’m also pretty sure it’s just an animal.
“Cool. What do you think it wants?”
The T. rex defied expectations once more by clearing its throat and beginning to sing. It was a really bad singer. “Ah! My ears!” I tried to cover my hearing holes only to find that I wasn’t entirely sure which organ, if any, allowed me to hear.
The T. rex was not dissuaded. It kept on singing horribly out of tune. Any chance that it may have been sapient was quickly erased when it began to add meaningless lyrics about some vague experience it may or may not have had. I will spare you, dear reader, of having to learn the entirety of the words to the song. Just imagine someone talking about how they might have been sad at some point in the past and could possibly be feeling happy at some time in the present or near or distant future. It also reminded me of disco for reasons I don’t fully understand.
I was still trying to figure out how to cover my ears. “Someone, please make this stop!” Asher called out.
I attempted kicking the creature. When that didn’t work, I tried throwing sand in its eyes, only to find that I was too small to toss anything very far. “It won’t give up!”
“I was wrong! We did die! This is hell!” Asher screamed. “THIS IS HELL!”
Each note was increasingly shrill. The melody became more and more bizarre, yet it stayed far enough away from random noise that it was impossible to tune out. We should have tried to run away from it, but the sounds that it was producing made rational thought impossible. The best we could do was scream in the hopes of drowning it out.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
It seemed that our fate would be to spend eternity listening to what a T. rex believed was the hit of the century. That was, until the T. rex blew up.
The monster did not stop, but it did falter. In the distance, our savior was racing to attack the behemoth. She was an old Velociraptor with short, lackluster feathers. She wore earmuffs on her head and a grenade launcher in her hands.
Bang!
Bang!
The T. rex gave up on its song and attacked the newcomer directly. She wove her way around it with masterful precision. The grenades, being raptor-sized, weren’t doing a ton of damage, but they were enraging the T. rex quite well. Finally, it reared down and tried to snap at the raptor with its jaws. I took the opportunity to jump in and poke it in the eyes.
The T. rex made agonized honking noises. It took another look at us and decided we weren’t worth it. It turned around to return to whatever horrible pit of demons it crawled out of.
“Are you okay?” the raptor asked us.
Asher was the first to say what we were both thinking. “Wait. Just to be certain, you didn’t save us just now for the sake of slowly and painfully devouring us later.”
“I take it you’ve met Oort,”
“Yeah, do you know him?”
“I’d say he’s an old friend, but I never really liked him to begin with. I’ll tell you all about him if you let me see that doohickey you’re holding.”
Asher was unsure about what to do, so I was the one that had to step in. “Tell us why we should trust you. Then we’ll talk.”
She sighed. “Fine. Follow me.” She walked off to some faraway location.
Asher whispered to me, “Are you sure we should follow her? It might be a trap,”
I gestured at the endless expanse all around us.
“Fair enough.”
Onwards we marched in the vast wasteland. I couldn’t tell you how the raptor was able to navigate the series of seemingly identical sand dunes. Maybe she had some kind gizmo that helped her figure out where she was. Maybe she sold her soul in exchange for desert crossing powers. I don’t know. Regardless, we made it out and into a floodplain within only a few short hours. I seriously don’t want to know where we would have ended up had we just picked a random direction and started wandering.
Compared to the desert, the floodplain was vibrant and full of life. Green plants were everywhere. Dragonflies buzzed past what appeared to be a giant mutant duck with muscly arms.3 The flowers contributed to a musky aroma.
We eventually arrived at a gathering of Velociraptors. I wanted to call it a village, but they didn’t really have any permanent structures to sleep in. Instead, there were various piles of different kinds of technology that each raptor tinkered with almost obsessively. For the most part, they were all too absorbed by their machinations to notice us, but if we got too close to their stuff, they’d start hissing.
The raptor that had been guiding us eventually arrived at what appeared to be her own pile of things. Without saying a word, she spent about ten minutes sifting through a mound of clutter. Then she pulled out a projector and held it above her head triumphantly. She set it down in front of a whiteboard and began displaying a series of images. I groaned. She wanted us to sit through a slideshow presentation.
“My name is Monkeychunks,” she began.
I raised my hand. “Is that your real name?”
“Yes, my parents were jerks. Thank you for bringing that up. Moving on.” She went to the next slide: a picture of a giant rock hurtling through the void. “Six months ago, my telescopes detected a large asteroid headed straight towards Earth. There is no way to destroy or redirect it. In five years, it will hit us and wipe out nearly all life on the planet.” The next slide showed a cartoon Earth with a smiley face on it.
“This is horrific,” I whispered to Asher. He didn’t notice me. He had tuned out of the presentation and was drawing a diagram in the dirt.
“Yes,” he said to himself. “This’ll work.”
Monkeychunks looked at me sharply. “Ahem. With this knowledge, I called upon a council of my fellow Velociraptors. Together, we decided that the most intelligent among us were to work together to design the most complex contraption ever conceived of. A machine to change our fate.” The next slide had a photo of the device I held in my very hands. “A time machine to be specific.”
“What?!" I half asked, half exclaimed. "That’s so dangerous! What about paradoxes?!”
“Although it is theoretically possible to create a paradox, we have found that nature naturally tries to right itself.” She switched to a picture of a purple
crystal shard. “Unfortunately, it turns out that time travel is only possible through the use of a rare hypothetical substance known as aether. If it did exist, it would be capable of rapidly breaking down nearby organic life. As such, we were unable to actually build the machine ourselves. Instead, we made blueprints and buried them to be found by future civilizations. By default, the time machine sends the user back to the present. Well, the present from our perspective. Judging by your scent, I’m guessing this is about 66 million years in the past for you.”
“How can you tell just by smelling me?”
She sighed. She was growing tired of my questions. “Listen, we don’t have time to explain every little piece of exposition. Either way, the plan worked
shockingly well.” The next slide had a photo of an old, featherless raptor lying unconscious with the time machine in its grip. “A raptor from the future came to us with the time machine. We don’t know where he came from or how he got it, and we may never find out considering that something knocked him unconscious right before he went back to our time. Nonetheless, we did finally have a time machine. That was, until this jerk showed up.” She showed a picture of Oort Percival in a devil costume, drinking the tears of children.
“Him! He’s the worst!” I told her.
“Indeed, he is. From the beginning, Oort was unnecessarily cruel and had something of a god complex. After he suggested for the fifteenth time that we use the time machine to overthrow all sentient species that may evolve and then kill them repeatedly, we decided to exile him. He left, swearing that he would one day wreak ‘horrible, bloody vengeance’ upon us all. Not having anything better to do, he spent his time spying on us in secret. When someone came back with the time machine, he wasted no time stealing both the machine and the person that brought it to us. This all happened about two hours ago. Just now, I saw a flash of light and thought it may have come from another time machine. It did.”
“This is a lot of information. I’m not sure I understand it all. Who was the raptor that actually brought back the time machine?”
“We don’t know for certain, but facial analysis suggests that it may actually be Oort from the future.”
I shuddered. If what she said was true, he had unwittingly turned himself into an unthinking robot.
“Now it’s your turn," she informed me. "You need to give a presentation explaining everything that has happened to you up until the point we met.”
“What?! But I’m not prepared!”
“Tough luck. We don’t have a lot of time. Also, I will be judging your presentation harshly.”
“No! Noooooooooooooo!”
The presentation was fine.
Asher didn’t help. He was busy staring at the duck dino.
“Interesting,” Monkeychunks said. “So he thinks that sentient prey tastes better. What a dillweed."
“You're telling me. What can we do to stop him?”
Monkeychunks’ face lit up. “I’m so glad you asked. Since we seem to have similar goals, considering your need to not get eaten and our desire to avoid bloody vengeance, I think we should work together. My idea is that we use the life-decaying properties of aether to fight back against Oort.”
Asher had finished doing– whatever it was he was doing. He looked very proud of himself and had decided to rejoin the conversation. “We have a time machine. That seems like a much more effective weapon. Also, I’m still confused about the smell thing.” Okay. Apparently he had been listening the whole time.
“Oort probably has his own time machine. All it takes to create a double is going back in time by a day or so. The only reason he hasn’t shown up here yet is because it's only accurate within a week. There’s no technological reason for that. It’s just that Kyle was in charge of programming the UI, and he did a really bad job.”
A raptor in the neighboring pile piped up. “Hey! The deadlines you gave me were impossible! It’s not my fault if the finished product has a few jagged edges!”
“All you needed to do was make it possible to enter a time and place. You added fifty million buttons and no one knows what they do.”
“They would if they read the manual.”
“But you didn’t write a manual, did you?”
“I can’t be expected to take care of every single detail.”
Monkeychunks threw a computer chip at him. His eyes went wide as he lunged to grab it. “That should keep him distracted for a while,” she remarked. “Anyway, as I was saying, we also can’t use anything else either since Oort has had the opportunity to collect every defense that has ever been made in history. An uncounterable weapon may have been created in some far-flung branch of the future, but we can’t know that for sure. The only reason aether works is because it isn’t of this world, and no one has had a chance to find a way to stop it.”
Asher considered this. “No. It would still just be easier to stop his parents from meeting or something, and you still haven’t told us why we wouldn’t die from the aether.” I found it strange how Asher had suddenly decided he had big opinions on this when he’d been off in his own world earlier. What was going on inside his mind?
“Stop poking holes and let me finish! The time machine can’t go back any farther than this. We wanted to minimize paradoxes. As for avoiding death by aether toxicity, I think it only affects biological life. You function almost like robots made from grain.”
Considering our past experiences, I didn’t like the comparison to robots, but that wasn’t the most alarming part of her statement. “What do you mean ‘I think’?”
“I didn’t make you, okay? I can only be about 75% certain about how you function. I’m still confident in that 75%. This’ll work. Probably.”
I thought this was absurd. “You can’t ask us to do this! You do it!”
“I did explain how you’re the only beings capable of handling aether, didn’t I? This is going to be fine. You use the time travel logs to find the coordinates of whoever originally built it, take their aether, stop Oort, and come back to save us raptors. It’s the only choice.”
“No, it isn’t!” Asher said.
“You got a better idea?” she asked.
Asher stood motionless for an uncomfortably long amount of time. Right before I could ask if he was okay, he said, “No, I do not.”
“I know this is scary, but we can do it. I can even explain how to work the time machine. We should have at least a day before Oort shows up. It basically involves doing the opposite of whatever is most intuitive.”
I don’t know if we would have accepted the plan then or continued protesting. A blinding flash of light came from the center of the raptor's makeshift home. In an instant, Percival materialized beside his iron companion. He made a strange sound somewhere between a squawk and a laugh. He turned his gaze directly to me. “You know, when I brought you to life, I thought you would run around a bit before I inevitably tore you apart and ate you. I didn’t realize you had this much fight. At first, I was worried you may cause some damage, but this is actually great. It’s the most excitement I’ve had in years.”
Monkeychunks grabbed the time machine out of my hands before I could react. She furiously typed in coordinates to what I hoped was the location of the time machine’s creator. Percival pulled out a grenade launcher.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you,” he told her. “You’re next on my murder list.”
He handed it to the cyborg. It blasted the machine out of Monkeychunks’ claws and into a nearby ditch. “So that’s where my spare grenade launcher went,” she said.
“I know what to do!” Asher exclaimed. “Monkeychunks, hold off the cyborg! Jelly, grab the time machine!”
We didn’t need to be told twice. Monkeychunks picked up her own grenade launcher and attacked. With every shot, their missiles met in midair. This resulted in giant explosions of increasing epic-ness. The other raptors took notice of what was going on. They panicked and ran away, carrying their precious inventions in giant bindles with robotic legs.
Asher reached into the river and pulled out a fish with his bare hands. Holding the fish in his mouth, he quickly climbed up a nearby tree. From there, he jumped onto the back of the giant duck-like dinosaur we had seen earlier. He held the fish in front of its head and steered the beast where he wanted it to go.
Meanwhile, I was trying to get to the ditch where the time machine had fallen. Since the cyborg was preoccupied with Monkeychunks, it was Percival’s job to chase after me. Except he didn’t really chase. He took his sweet time savoring every step. He wasn’t too concerned about me getting away.
Monkeychunks and the cyborg had given up on grenades. They were fighting hand to hand. Monkeychunks was doing okay, but the cyborg’s near-infinite endurance and ability to taste fear seemed to be giving it the upper hand. Then it transformed its robotic arm into a chainsaw. A literal chainsaw. This was going poorly.
Asher was not using his duck thing to fight the cyborg. Instead, he was ramming it into a tree repeatedly. The tree looked big and strong, but apparently, it was much flimsier than it seemed. It shook quite violently.
I had nearly made it to the gully where the time machine lay when I tripped on a root. I tried to keep going, but my foot was stuck. Percival was getting closer and closer. If this was how I died, I would be sorely disappointed. Stretching, I just barely managed to reach the machine. I knew I couldn’t leave without Asher. Once more, the time machine’s most important feature was being a blunt, metal object. I slammed it against the root until I was free. This had the side effect of severely injuring my leg.
Now, as I tried to limp back, Percival sped up. “I’m going to enjoy this.” He knocked me over with a kick and stepped on me. I couldn’t get up. He slowly raised his hook-shaped claw.
“Watch out!” Asher shouted.
With a crash, the tree came tumbling down directly onto us. Using my last burst of strength, I tumbled out of the way in the nick of time. Percival was trapped under an enormous pile of leaves and branches.
Monkeychunks was still holding off the cyborg. “Go!” she ordered, “I’ve already input the coordinates. I’ll be fine!”
Asher fed his dinosaur the fish and hopped off of it. “You heard her. Let’s go!”
My gaze turned to Percival. His limbs were pinned down as he struggled to escape. We had bested him for now. When he turned to meet my gaze, he became eerily still. He gave me a relaxed, knowing grin, but in his eyes, I saw a manic glimmer. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have just time traveled away, and that would be the end of it. Yet that same gut instinct that allowed me to make quick decisions told me to go over to him.
“You’re never going to stop us, you old, spiteful lizard,” I taunted.
This elicited another one of his strange laughs. “Oh, Jelly. Haven’t you heard?” He pulled out an arm that I thought had been stuck beneath the tree. “I’m more closely related to crocodiles.” He struck at the time machine, creating a nasty-looking dent.
Asher reached for me just as a blue tendril of lightning shot out from the machine and hit us both.
I had no idea what was about to happen.